Zhongtang Luo (How to Read: Zone-Tan Lowe) 羅中瑭 Ph.D. Student Department of Computer Science Purdue University Institutional Email: luo401 [at] purdue [dot] edu Personal Email: zhtluo [at] gmail [dot] com CV       Google Scholar       Codeforces       Twitter

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student in the CS department of Purdue since 2021. My advisor is Prof. Aniket Kate. I am a member of the Freedom Research Lab. Previously I had my undergrad in Zhiyuan ACM Class at Shanghai Jiao Tong University during 2016–2020.

In my research, I look at how to make industry and academic work on cryptography, distributed systems, blockchains and applied security match up better, especially in how they handle efficiency and security. I've looked at things like consensus and data provenance. I see that companies focus on making their prototypes fast and efficient, while academia cares more about making sure these prototypes are formalized and secure. This difference creates a gap. My main question is: Can we find a way to make prototypes that are both fast and formalized?

Publications

• Attacking and Improving the Tor Directory Protocol
  [IEEE SP'24] [Preprint] [Poster]
  
  Zhongtang Luo, Adithya Bhat, Kartik Nayak, Aniket Kate
• Last Mile of Blockchains: RPC and Node-as-a-service
  [IEEE TPS'22] [Preprint]
  
  Zhongtang Luo, Rohan Murukutla, Aniket Kate
• RandPiper - Reconfiguration-Friendly Random Beacons with Quadratic Communication
  [CCS'21] [Preprint]
  
  Adithya Bhat, Nibesh Shrestha, Zhongtang Luo, Aniket Kate, Kartik Nayak

Projects

Applied Cryptography & Multi-party Computation:

• OrgAn: Organizational Anonymity with Low Latency

Distributed System Security:

• A Tor Consensus Monitor that Detects Equivocation
• Keyedge: Edge call protocol helper for Keystone Enclave

Teaching

• CS41100 - CP3 Competitive Programming III (Spring 2024) (Instructor)
  [Course Page]
• CS31100 - CP2 Competitive Programming II (Fall 2023) (Instructor)
  [Course Page]
• CS25100 Data Structures & Algorithms (Fall 2021) (Teaching Assistant)
  [Syllabus]

Competitive Programming

I am an active participant in competitive programming. I won a silver medal in ICPC 2018 World Finals with my wonderful teammates: Wenda Qiu and Boning Li.

• Competitive Programming Hall of Fame: Zhongtang Luo
• Codeforces: Zhtluo

A couple tutorials on certain subjects in CP:

• Linear Sieve
• Mobius Inversion
• Dirichlet Convolution
• The Application of ML Techniques on Certain Problems
• Splay Tree: One Tree to Rule Them All
• From Burnside to Polya: A Short Introduction to Group Theory
• Constant Optimization on Binary Exponentiation and Matrix Multiplication
• LLL — Yet Another Paper-Reading Problem
• Rant on Incorrect ECNA 2023 C (Computational Geometry)
• The Reason You are Bad at Codeforces — You are Not Russian Enough
• All You Need is Randomly Guessing — How to Improve at Codeforces

CTF Write-up

• Raymond James CTF 2023 Write-up
• BuckeyeCTF 2023 Write-up
• Purdue Raymond James Qualifier Write-up

Miscellaneous Projects

Projects not related to academia:

• vjudge-to-tex: A script that transforms VJudge descriptions to TeX files with ChatGPT
• Event to ICS
• TikZAI: a ChatGPT Tool to Generate TikZ Code from Hand-Drawn Figures
• A LaTeX Slide and Poster Template for Purdue University

Random Subjects

Other stuffs that I have written - notes, essays, etc:

• Editing
  • Random Vim Commands
• Purdue
  • Link Your Homepage in Purdue
  • Purdue Tundra Server Specification & Access
  • Connect to Purdue VPN without Cisco
  • Purdue CS Printer Setup for Ubuntu
  • Use PAL and eduroam in Purdue
• System Setup
  • HP Color Laser Jet MFP Email Setup 'Test was unsuccessful'
  • My Screen Setup on Ubuntu
  • Inaccessible Boot Device after Installing SSD to a New Machine
  • Dual Boot Windows and Ubuntu with Full Disk Encryption
  • Anacron and Mail Backup
  • Host an E-mail Service on Your Own VPS
  • Host a Website Fast
  • Use Specific Fonts on a Website
  • Use Math Formulas and Syntax Highlight in HTML
  • VSCode SSH as root
• Notes
  • Concentration Bound
  • Some Interesting Papers
• LaTeX
  • Use bibtool to Extract from CryptoBib
  • Nerd Font in LaTeX
  • Gitignore for TeX
  • Write Japanese and Chinese in LuaTeX
  • Use TeX Gyre Font in LuaLaTeX
  • Use LaTeX, SVG and EMF Files in Google Slides
  • Circumvent arXiv LaTeX Detection
  • LaTeX Math Font List
  • Position a Graph, Scope, etc. in TikZ
  • Convert LaTeX to Image